TORONTO — Jennifer Mong smiled and pumped her fist triumphantly as she hoisted the silver Canspell Cup, celebrating her victory in the eighth annual Postmedia Canspell National Spelling Bee on Wednesday.

The 12-year-old from St. John’s studied her winning word — “vindaloo” — a week ago with mother Jessie Mong, who told her to remember that it had something to do with garlic.

“I’m just really happy that all the hours and minutes and all that year that I spent working has finally come to an end,” Jennifer said.

Related

Her mother added: “Truly, Jennifer’s dream has come true. We will never forget this day.”

The win was a surprise because with Jennifer busy with violin, piano, dance and karate, it wasn’t always easy to find time to prepare.

“I’m delighted, I don’t know what other word can describe it,” she said.

The final rounds saw a tense back-and-forth between Jennifer and 12-year-old Mignon Tsai, of Abbotsford, B.C. Mignon was disqualified after misspelling “zanzibari.”

On Wednesday night, Mong said she hadn’t been able to eat because of nerves.

“Every time (Jennifer) walked up to the microphone, I could feel the pressure building on me and I would get really scared,” she said.

When Jennifer didn’t know a word — which wasn’t very often — she guessed the spelling based on the language of origin. “I was confident and nervous at the same time,” she said.

Jennifer said she started preparing for the bee last May, trying to put in an hour of studying on weekends and half an hour on weekdays, and had hoped to get into the top three. The aspiring veterinarian said she plans to save her $7,500 education award.

“I’m not an impulsive person, I would have to think about it for a little bit, but I’ll probably just store it in my bank account for college,” she said.

Mignon took second place and a $5,000 award, while 11-year-old Zhongtian Wang from Windsor, Ont., took third place and $2,500. The top three spellers will head to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May.

Veronica Penny of Rockland, Ont., considered a favourite to win the competition, slipped on the word “opotherapy,” spelling it “apotherapy.”

Her face fell when the judges sounded the dreaded “ding” indicating the word was misspelled. Veronica, 14, was hoping to win in her fourth and final year at Canspell. She placed second in 2011.

For Veronica, who said she studied three hours a day for the past year, the result seemed to be more a matter of luck than anything.

“It was pretty disappointing,” she said. “I felt like I knew every word in the bee except the one I got.”

The bee, for students in grades 4 to 8, was launched in 2005 to encourage children to have a love of words and reading. The bee will be broadcast in a one-hour CBC Television special on April 1.

Eight of 21 spellers remain after the early rounds of the eighth annual Postmedia Canspell National Spelling Bee, as they break for a late lunch.

Many in the audience held their breath as the spellers walked up to the microphone, one after another, some measuring every letter, others rushing through. All it takes is one misspelled word to remove the competitor; offenders in the early rounds included “douane,” “roodebok” and “ursine.”

Related

In the spellers’ lounge, those who had been disqualified battled frustration and tears at times. But a combination of cookies, encouragement from the Canspell crew and a communal game of Trivial Pursuit lightened the mood. Spellers exchanged handshakes and good-natured complaints about the words they could not.

“It’s a disappointment. [But] it’s so much more important all the stuff that they’ve learned and the friends they’ve made. Stick around and cheer the other spellers on,” said Dr. Jacques Bailly, who pronounces the words for the spellers at Canspell and the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

He tries to present an encouraging face when the spellers are nervous at the podium. Saying “everyone is a winner” may be cliche, but it has some truth to it, he said.

“Their parents have them in this, and they’re doing this, more for what they learn and you can’t take that away, you know?” he said. “They’ve won that, and it’s hard-won and they’ll keep it.”

The bee started at CBC at 1 p.m. and will resume at 4:30 p.m. Spellers are eliminated after misspelling a word, and the winner must be the only remaining speller in their round to have spelled a word correctly.

Today’s winner will receive the Canspell Cup and a $7,500 educational award sponsored by Egg Farmers of Canada. The three top spellers will also go to the well-known Scripps bee in May.

The bee, for students in grades 4 to 8, was launched by Postmedia Network in 2005 to encourage children to have a love of words and reading. The bee will be broadcast in a one-hour CBC Television special on April 1.

TORONTO — Just as NDP conventioneers and Canadian Music Week performers filtered out of Toronto on Sunday, the city’s Sheraton Hotel began to fill with the 21 competitors set to face off at Wednesday’s Postmedia Canspell National Spelling Bee.

Ranging from as far afield as Victoria and St. John’s, the competitors all qualified for the Bee in regional championships that were held through February and March.

Charlottetown’s Matthew MacDonald was one of the first arrivals. In 2010, MacDonald got to seventh place before he slipped on “geognosy.” The next year he climbed to fifth place before an incorrect recitation of “domiciliary” put him out of the running. Now in Grade 8 it is clear that this year’s tournament is his last — and he’s just happy to have another shot. “I just want to do well at the Bee,” he said.

Samara St. Louis from Saskatoon is making her first bid for the title. She speaks some French and, as a violin and piano player, she said she absorbs a fair bit of Italian amid musical terms such as “crescendo” and “fortissimo.” Words at the Canspell tournament run the gamut from French to Hebrew to Arabic — giving bilingual or trilingual competitors a significant leg up.

On Sunday, early arrivals gathered in the Sheraton’s Speller Lounge to socialize — and go over words. For most, word practice is pretty similar: Friends or family members read from a list of 1,200 supplied practice words, and the spellers try their hand at answering them. Others, like St. Louis, keep a collection of index cards on hand at all times. “I just look over my words when I can,” she said.

Still, she said there is not a lot of last-minute cramming to be seen.

The Top 3 competitors will receive $7,500, $5,000 and $2,500 respectively, donated by the Egg Farmers of Canada. The Bee’s Top 3 champions will compete in May at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., where they will face challengers from across the United States, as well as Mexico, the Bahamas and Ghana.

This year’s Bee is the first in four years without Toronto’s Laura Newcombe, who claimed her third consecutive win last year with “mycetophagous.” Key Newcombe rival Veronica Penny will be competing.

Newcombe went on to claim a thrilling second place in the 2011 Scripps Bee.

The Canspell National Spelling Bee was launched in 2005 by Postmedia Network as a way to encourage children to embrace reading and writing. It is now in its eighth year.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/competitors-gather-for-canspell-national-spelling-bee/feed/1stdSpeller Kaleigh Beer, 12, Calgary, AB, hams it up by kissing the Postmedia/Canspell Cup as she's being taped for the CBC, in Toronto, ON, on March 25, 2012. 21 spellers from across Canada, representing various Postmedia newspapers arrived today and will be competing this week in Toronto to be crowned the national spelling bee champion.Grade seven student Sara Ferros wins Toronto regional Canspell spelling beehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-grade-seven-student-sara-ferros-wins-canspell-spelling-bee
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-grade-seven-student-sara-ferros-wins-canspell-spelling-bee#commentsSat, 18 Feb 2012 22:09:48 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=142464

The Canspell Toronto Regional Spelling Bee victory seemed to “materialize” for 12-year-old Sara Ferros. After all, that was the word she clinched the title with.

Ms. Ferros beat out 55 other Toronto-area school champions for the title, including runner-up Pranav Srikanth, who ran into trouble in the sixth, and ultimately final, round when he was faced with the word “Rambla”— a dry river bed or ravine. But Ms. Ferros swept in after that, clinching the victory, the $5,000 prize provided by the Egg Farmers of Canada that goes with it, and booking her ticket to the Postmedia Canspell National Final in Toronto on March 28th.

But Ms. Ferros never expected to get this far, and in fact was competing for the first time this year.

“I didn’t really expect to win, I just thought it might be fun,” she said, adding that she was excited to bring her trophy to St. Raymond Gifted Centre, where she is a student, to show her classmates next week.

Making the win perhaps even more impressive is the difficulty level of the words she and the other competitors had to face. Spellers sweated their way through their first words, their nerves clearly showing as they asked frequently for the country of origin, alternate pronunciations and definitions of the word. But they soldiered through, deftly maneuvering through silent letters, double consonants and old world languages.

Those early rounds started slowly, with only a few spellers eliminated in the first round, including one that sparked a small furor. Noah Vale, speller number 55, misheard the word “inferno” for “infernal” and was promptly eliminated, but after a brief appeal, was re-instated into the competition in time for the next round.

And as the competition wore on, the spellers showed a certain camaraderie. High fives were exchanged, nervous smiles were tossed back and forth and every time a speller was eliminated, a roar of support engulfed them, both from the assembled crowd and from their competitors. Little Hamzah Shihadeh, the youngest competitor at seven years old, felt that camaraderie when he battled through a couple of tough round, only to bow out in the fourth round and receive a huge show of support from the other spellers.

But as the attrition continued, competitors were left behind, waiting in the wings for the end of the competition.

And that attrition had left only 11 spellers by the fifth round, all duking it out for a shot at the anticipated championship word, the final word to end the competition. By the end of the fourth round, it was down to Ms. Ferros and Mr. Srikanth. After Ms. Ferros clinched the victory, and the trophy that National Post Editor-in-Chief Stephen Meurice presented to her as the winner, Mr. Srikanth sidled up and congratulated her for a bee well done, in the truest spirit of the competition.

Ms. Ferros will be competing with 20 other spellers from across Canada on March 28th for the Canspell Cup, $15,000 worth of education awards from the Egg Farmers of Canada and a ticket to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-grade-seven-student-sara-ferros-wins-canspell-spelling-bee/feed/2stdSara Ferros won first place at the Canspell Toronto Regional Spelling Bee on Saturday. Ms. Ferros will be competing with 20 other spellers from across Canada on March 28 for the Canspell CupScripps 2011: One letter from top of the worldhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/scripps-2011-one-letter-from-top-of-the-world
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/scripps-2011-one-letter-from-top-of-the-world#commentsSat, 04 Jun 2011 11:45:57 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=68945

She was one word away from clinching the world title in spelling. One letter away, really.

Plunking a silent ‘p’ ahead of “sorites,” a Greek word describing a type of argument, cost Laura Newcombe the top spot at the Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night, a loss Canada’s reigning spelling champ will not recover as she marks her retirement from spelling bees.

Her showing at the bee is, in many ways, a win.

That the 12-year-old word whiz, sponsored by the National Post and representing Canada at the Scripps competition, made it all the way to second place is a huge accomplishment, one that effectively makes her the next best speller in the world. She made it to 5th place last time, and ranked 19th on her first try.

Reached at her hotel in Maryland Friday, Laura said she had mixed feelings about coming in second place next to Sukanya Roy, a 14-year-old from Scranton, Penn., who won with the word “cymotrichous,” another Greek word referring to wavy hair. Laura had won the Canspell bee in Canada this spring for the third time in a row, and she had her eagle eye set on winning Scripps.

“[I’m] a bit sad because, you know, everybody wants to win,” she said. “But I know that second place is very good and I think, it is basically the world, isn’t it? It’s still a very big thing. I know that I did my best and I guess I’m just happy.”

Faced with her last word in the finals just before midnight Thursday, one could see signs of uncertainty etched on her face.

“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “Usually I would go through roots and words like it, but I couldn’t. There were a lot of different words that it could have been related to. And I think it was just the only thing I really could do was guess. And I guessed wrong.”

She did, however, know how to spell both of Sukanya’s final words.

Laura capped her intense week of Scripps participation, which included a secretive spelling test and the bee broadcast live on ESPN, with a sightseeing trip around Washington, D.C., checking out the Jefferson, Lincoln, George Washington, and Vietnam memorials with her family before visiting the Smithsonian, where she got to see the Hope Diamond.

Laura can’t compete in Canspell or in Scripps next year because she will be entering Grade 9 (Scripps also has an age cap of 15), so retirement is all but inevitable. But it’s a “good time” to stop, she said, as she makes the transition to high school.

She tells other aspiring spellers to just have fun with the bees, don’t take them too seriously. And work very, very hard.

Ever the reluctant victor, Laura acknowledges her final act with a touch of humility.